Tom Courtenay lusts after Julie Christie in the fanciful "kitchen sink" drama of the British New Wave, "Billy Liar" (1963)

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES – Last month if you had asked me to describe the British New Wave, I would have thought you were referring to a Tsunami warning off Portsmouth. But having now watched 1963’s “Billy Liar,” I can answer the question properly. “Billy Liar” was actually one of the last of what they referred to as British “Kitchen Sink” dramas that were released between 1959 and 1963.??They were gritty, working-class stories shot in black and white, about ordinary Joes and Jills living in contemporary England - the literal opposite of Hollywood glamour. In director John Schlesinger’s??“Billy Liar,” written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, from their imaginative play, newcomer Tom Courtenay portrays bored funeral home clerk Billy Fisher who has a whale of an imagination and a confounding love life to boot. Waterhouse and Hall were inspired by James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and Billy is very Mitty-like. While living at home, he’s engaged to two women – Barbara (Helen Fraser) and Rita (Gwendolyn Watts), both of whom are not aware of the other. Meanwhile, he’s lusting after gorgeous Liz (Julie Christie) who is very much a kindred free spirit (the movie introduced Christie to the world, and she was soon a major star – reteaming with Courtenay two years later in “Dr. Zhivago”). Billy is indeed quite the liar, and his world is constantly in chaos. He works for funeral director Emanuel Shadrack (a stuffy Leonard Rossiter) and his partner Mr. Duxbury (the legendary Finlay Currie). I loved the fantasy sequences, where Billy is the enthusiastic leader of a fictional country called Ambrosia – he’s the prime minister, the lead General, a common soldier, even a military bandmaster.??So check this one out and get a feeling for this brief interlude in British film history before kitchen sink dramas were replaced by lush filmmaking like “Tom Jones” and the arrival of the James Bond movies.??And please tune in tonight to my podcast, “Steve Rubin’s Saturday Night at the Movies,” where I interview “Twilight Zone” actor William Reynolds (“The Purple Testament”) who speaks of his 1950s film career at Universal, Paramount and Fox, where he worked with the likes of Audie Murphy, James Mason, Jeff Chandler and Tony Curtis. Stay safe.?